Solo Technology

A bit over a month ago, I mentioned Comment Timeout, a WordPress plugin that can be very helpful in the ongoing battle against blog spam. It does some slick stuff and even has integration with Bad Behavior, another great weapon in the same battle.

The option to automatically block comments with bbcode in them is priceless. I’ve never received a real comment with bbcode in it…

It really does wonders too. Sure, Akismet catches 99.9% of the spam I get, but when I’m running Comment Timeout, the number of caught spam plummets dramatically. I try to scan the spam lists for false-positives and I’d much rather look at 5 than 105.

All that leads up to this: I’m having a minor issue. Not a technical issue, but more of a “social” issue. To get great results, I was closing posts to comments after 270 days or 45 days since last comment. That effectively stops conversation on a lot of posts!

I’ve since gone the other extreme too: Close ‘em after 730 days (2 years) or 180 days after last comment. But that’s perhaps too far. I’m seeing a lot more (caught) spam again.

What’s a good compromise? 1 year and 90 since last comment maybe? Actually, as I ponder this, the key here is the “since last comment” part… if that includes trackbacks or pingbacks (and it seems to), I could set the first value relatively short (1 year?) but that latter much longer to keep “active” posts open.

Thoughts?

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